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This workshop is intended to bring together empirically-oriented Construction Grammar approaches with the specific aims to (i) advance promote interaction and cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on languages other than English and (ii) further the growing trend towards multi-methodological research and converging evidence from corpora, experimentation, and simulation. Proposals are invited on observational and/or experimental studies on any aspect of constructions. Studies focusing on non-English data as well as cross linguistic analyses between other languages and English are welcome.

Call for Papers

The notion of constructions, understood as learned form-meaning parings of non-predictable as well as highly frequent predictable linguistic expressions, has introduced a new perspective on language: grammatical knowledge is not viewed as modular, but rather as knowledge of a highly structured and interconnected network of symbolic units, which in turn is viewed as a lexico-semantic continuum, the so-called constructicon (Langacker 1987; Goldberg 1995, 2006). While an increasing number of constructional studies have been adopting the usage-based model of constructions in which it is assumed that grammar is shaped by usage (Goldberg 2006) and children learn a language in a bottom-up fashion (Tomasello 2003), the range of existing studies is narrower than it would ideally be.

On the one hand, there is the usual predominance of work on English: with the exception of Fried & Östman (2004) and Croft's typological work on Radical Construction Grammar (e.g., Croft 2001), there is as yet unsatisfactorily little construction-grammar work on different languages. On the other hand, even though Construction Grammarians have been embracing different methodologies and sources of data, there is still a need for more methodologically diverse and comprehensive studies, especially since while all types of data can provide linguistic evidence to a certain degree, there is no single linguistic method that can cover and answer all types of research questions (cf. Arppe et al. 2010).

Objectives

This workshop is intended to bring together empirically-oriented Construction Grammar approaches with the specific aims to (i) advance promote interaction and cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on languages other than English and (ii) further the growing trend towards multi-methodological research and converging evidence from corpora, experimentation, and simulation. Proposals are invited on observational and/or experimental studies on any aspect of constructions. Studies focusing on non-English data as well as cross linguistic analyses between other languages and English are welcome.

Procedure

Proposals should be in English, and each presentation should be adjusted to a 30-minute slot (20 min. + 10 min. for discussion). Interested colleagues are invited to send an e-mail to Jiyoung Yoon (jiyoung.yoonunt.edu) and Stefan Th. Gries (stgrieslinguistics.ucsb.edu), with their name, affiliation and a provisional abstract (max. 100 words) before 12 November 2010.